By George Capsis
I got a call from one of my readers who has now become a friend, to say a murder had just taken place on Bedford Street and I had met the man who had been murdered.
I had been sitting out last summer at a small table near the kitchen of a now closed Peruvian Restaurant on the corner of Bedford and Christopher when I was introduced to him and we chatted pleasantly for 20 minutes or so and I discovered later he had been in the Israeli army.
I can’t remember what we talked about but he was very pleasant and friendly. One paper reported he was a bail bondsman or at least lent money for bail from time to time, but the general conclusion was it was a drug deal gone wrong. The odd thing about him is that he rented two apartments connected by a spiral staircase in the same small building at 110 Bedford, although there was only he and his wife (I am guessing one apartment was for storing the drugs and conducting business and the other for living).
It seems that the man who shot our local Village neighbor was seen rushing towards Christopher with a bag of drugs.
We called the police press office to learn he was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, which is way up on 77th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue, and my guess is that the Northwell Urgent Care center on 13th and 7th which always has a standby Lenox Hill ambulance got the call, but he may have been dead when they found him on Bedford Street so he did not feel, as I did with a blockage in my intestines, the long bumpy ride up Park Avenue to Lenox Hill Hospital—reminding me again that we have to get one of the new billionaires who are now finishing their swimming pool mansions not too far from the site of the Bedford Street shooting to donate a new hospital. Who knows—perhaps we could have saved this victim selling pot as it becomes legal.
Dusty got all excited and hurried over to the scene of the crime and was rewarded by finding reporters from the Daily News, Post and The Villager buttonholing tenants as they came out for any morsel of news.
I keep disciplining myself that we are a small very local newspaper so we should concentrate on local news, but it is a bit unnerving to discover you know the victim of one bit of the “local news.”
For a long time now it has been my wish that WestView readers give me their e-mail address so we can send them a news flash when somebody calls to say my neighbor just got shot.
Our very capable Kim is working on this but you can start right now.
YES, I want to receive WestView news flashes and I am sending my name, address, and telephone number to gcapsis@gmail.com.
